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And 87 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Er... that _was_ the spirit in which you made that comment, right?
For the record, I use "shall" in asserting requirements that must be met, come hell or come high water (the product is not allowed out the door if these aren't met), "will" for requirements that better be met unless there's a really good reason not to meet them, and other less imperative formulations for nice-to-have items that get included in a requirements doc. I do this because that's the standard around here for product and engineering requirements specification. I've seen the same language used for municipal infrastructure contracts and the requests for tender that led up to them.
I also object (whine?) to the arbitrary and/or malicious destruction of value in the language, when words are destroyed through stupidity and laxness (or ignorance that WILL not be instructed). I don't object to changes that preserve and increase utility.
My latest pet peeve is people who CHOOSE to destroy the distinction between I/we and me/us.
Yet I'm not in the camp that objects to the use of "they" and "their" when we've proven unable to agree on "s/he","his/her", "hir" or any of several other attempts to have a genderless singular personal pronoun (and associated possessive).
So with which brush am I being tarred, today? :-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Porrello, Leonard
Sent: January-22-13 1:08 PM
To: Combs, Richard; salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: The GUI shall do...
Does anyone else find it ironic that the same group that whines about word transformation also objects to the orthodox use of "shall"?
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